Protecting Fingerprint Data Using Watermarking

A motivation for the use of watermarking techniques in biometric systems has been the need to provide increased security to the biometrics data themselves. We introduce an application of wavelet-based watermarking method to hide the fingerprint minutiae data in fingerprint images. The application provides a high security to both hidden data (i.e. fingerprint minutiae) that have to be transmitted and the host image (i.e. fingerprint). The original unmarked fingerprint image is not required to extract the minutiae data. The method is essentially introduced to increase the security of fingerprint minutiae transmission and can also used to protect the original fingerprint image